An evolved EDGE PHY ASIC supporting soft-output equalization and Rx diversity

In this paper the first complete Evolved EDGE transceiver physical layer ASIC supporting receive diversity and soft-output Viterbi equalization is presented. It comprises transmitter and receiver with detector and a decoder with an autonomous incremental redundancy implementation. The ASIC reaches a measured sensitivity of -111.8dBm for single antenna GSM voice channels and achieves the reference interference performance for adjacent channels 12 dB above 3GPP requirements. It occupies 6mm² in 130nm CMOS with a power consumption between 5 and 39mW.